


Hungry Like the Wolf 359

by SpaceJackalope



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Food, Gen, Memory, Ships appear only minorly, a story about awkward bonding with your coworkers and missing people on Earth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 14:28:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14834015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceJackalope/pseuds/SpaceJackalope
Summary: The S1 Hephaestus crew is suffering through an awkward night, so Hera decides to learn some stuff.Rated T for mild swearing, and partial non-sexual nudity.





	Hungry Like the Wolf 359

**Author's Note:**

> Written to go with this delightful art by monsterpub! http://monsterpub.tumblr.com/post/174156267790
> 
> Many thanks to them, and to Reverse Big Bang moderators frith-in-thorns and lesbianjackrackham, for patience & encouragement while I dealt with final exams and a family emergency instead of getting words on paper.

“Happy New Year,” Hera says, and Eiffel laughs.

“Which one?”

Hilbert angrily mutters something under his breath about “Trek of the Two Wardrobes,” which Eiffel ignores.  

“Well…Rosh Hashanah? Vietnamese Lunar? Nowruz? Vanilla?” Minkowski giggles, then cuts it off, embarrassed. “There’s a lotta New Years, baby,” Eiffel continues, “and I just named the ones _I_ celebrate.”

Minkowski tries to cross her legs, still free-floating, and awkwardly side-spins instead. She presses one hand against the wall to stop herself from hitting it, her fingers bending back in an arc just shy of painful. She shifts her strong shoulder muscles, stretches her neck. “I should be good at this, goddammit!”

“Why?” Hilbert demands, frowning at her.

“Why what?” She grabs an overhead structural beam and folds her legs while still gripping it.

“Why do you think you should be good at maneuvering in low-gravity conditions? There is no logic in your statement.”

“Because I’ve been on the Hephaestus for months! I should be a master by now! I can do everything I want, but then I get tired and smack into walls!”

“No. Barring any formalized metric for proficiency, 10,000 hours of practice are required for mastery. You have had approximately—. Hera. What is the date?”

Hera sighs impatiently. “January 1st, 2014. New Year’s Day in the modern Gregorian Calendar.”

“Ah! Thank you, Hera,” both Hilbert and Eiffel reply at the same time, sounding momentarily like a single, unfamiliar, voice. Both Minkowski and Hera are unsettled. Hilbert continues, unaware. Behind his back, Doug mouths “yikes!” at one of Hera’s cameras, across from Minkowski’s corner.

“Commander Minkowski,” Hilbert insists, “you have had approximately 5,200 hours of practice. There is no reason for you to have achieved mastery. Give it time.” Eiffel looks unhappily at Hera again—this time because “comforting Hilbert” is more than a little spooky.

“…Ok,” Minkowski replies, slowly releasing her steadying beam and resting her hands on her thighs. She drifts towards the floor. “Wait, no! You and-and _Eiffel_ do just fine!”

“I have been in space before, Commander. I obtained the necessary core muscle coordination.”

She pulls a disgusted face, and turns to Eiffel. He shrugs eloquently. “I wanted to be a Jedi.”

“Oh my _God_ —”

“ _So_ , I got a scholarship for gymnastics lessons so I could learn backflips. Did it for five summers!”

Renee smiles, placated despite herself. The smiley face light Hera insisted on representing herself with (“because under current circumstances not being present myself seems like peeking through windows. Just _rude_ , and borderline illegal”) flickers in impatience.

“Eiffel,” Hera says, “did you say you celebrate _four_ different New Year’s?”

“Yup! My dad’s Jewish, my mama’s Persian—and this girl I knew once, Kate, got me in the habit of observing Vietnamese New Year too.”

Hera flashes rapidly. “Stupid! No, not you, Officer Eiffel! Goddard! I know all those holidays exist, but only because it’s on the internet. My calendar presets only have the most—vanilla—holidays. ‘A Diverse and Inclusive Employee Community,’ my ass! They don’t even _try_.” Her voice is rising as she warms to her theme. “You’ve all got to tell me, if there are holidays you’d like me to announce. I could just import every holiday, but maybe that would be a lot, but maybe I should do it anyway. _Ugh_. I hate Goddard, I really do.”

“Why would you hate Goddard?” Hilbert sounds alarmed, angry. “They’re the only reason you exist.”

Eiffel laughs. “So? Lots of people hate their parents.”

Hera snorts (even though she doesn’t have a nose, which means she…picked it up from a human? Would Goddard really program her to snort?), and then turns thoughtful. “Do you hate yours, Officer Eiffel?”

“Didn’t know them. What about you, Minkowski? We’ll skip Hilbert. We know ‘love is not a logical emotion, Captain Kirk.’” Hilbert glowers.

The commander’s face lightens. “Oh—I love my parents. When I lived at home, my mother liked to make crème puffs on New Year’s Eve. With lots of—ha!—vanilla. She’d put vanilla in the crème and a little kiss of almond extract in the pastry. And some years we’d eat them, the three of us, sitting around the kitchen table. It was a very old wooden table, not very interesting to look at. But my grandparents used to strip weapons and draft propaganda posters on it, in the back room of a Zazou dance club. And we ate on it most nights. When I was a bit older, sometimes my parents would have their friends over on New Year’s Eve—or I’d have mine—and we’d make chocolate fondue to dunk the puffs in. And we’d play the liar’s game—everyone at the table tells a story, but only one person drew the index card with a prompt to tell a true one, and then we have to guess who told the truth. And we wrote a wish on red paper, and went out into the garden to burn it at midnight. That’s a Polish thing.” She comes to herself with a start. “I’ve been talking _forever,_ I’m so sorry.”  

But Eiffel is floating like he’s lying on his stomach in midair, resting his chin on his hands, and Hilbert looks less scowly than usual.

“Commander Minkowski,” Hera chirps, “what does a crème puff taste like? For someone who’s never had food, you know.”

“Uhhhh…well. Wet? And good. I mean, vanilla comes from an orchid, so Mom’s taste kinda flowery? And almonds taste sweet, but not…very sweet, I guess?” Then, confidently: “Chocolate tastes like black velvet.”

There is a long silence, and then Hera says, dreamily, “Goddard should invent an artificial mouth.” Eiffel looks intrigued, and then swiftly disgusted and protective. Minkowski’s thinking about poison detection and drug-sniffing dogs. And who knows about Hilbert.

 “Is it really artificial if it works?” Eiffel says. “I mean, if you feel like it’s real, isn’t it…just real?”

Minkowski hangs her head in her hands. “They do not pay me enough.” A deep inhalation. “They do NOT pay me enough to sit in a room with a ragtag bunch of misfits and talk about philosophy while we’re all in our underwear. _Again_.”

“Commander, I object! We’re too stylish to be ragtag. Lovable misfits, _clearly_. Also. Was I in a coma when this happened before?”

“Oh. No. I went to college.”

“Oh! Same. Where’d you go?”

“Boston U. I majored in Physics.”

Eiffel grins, air-swims closer, and fistbumps her. “MassBay Community College. Welding.”

Hera, fascinated, asks whether Doug also talked about philosophy in his underwear in college. Hilbert looks ready to scream.

“Well…I did have a boyfriend whose apartment temp control never worked. We watched Buffy and ate ice cream in our underwear in the summer, and in the winter we took blankets to the couch and ate soup. Moses could make something good out of _anything_ , and he worked at a grocery store. The manager would look the other way if people took some of the stuff they were throwing out, the sort of thing that would still be good if you ate it quick. So he’d take whatever random stuff, and make soup, or casseroles, or pie, or… He could make salads that tasted like something more than wet leaves, and I’d never had that before. But my favorite thing was soup. Moses would take a bunch of squash—like, the pumpkiny kind. Winter squash. Not the soft yellow kind. And he’d stick it in a blender, and add a little butter and some spices, and cook it. And it tasted—Hera, it tasted like his plaid blanket. Like warmth, and safety, and a hand on my knee, and _just enough_. We’d drink it out of these big navy blue mugs with gold around the rim.”

Hilbert snaps. “That doesn’t answer the question! Which was about philosophy!”

Eiffel rolls his eyes. “You’ve never been a 19 year old with a boyfriend, or you’d know the answer.”

Hera giggles, then seems to feel guilty. “Dr. Hilbert, do you want to take a turn? Talking about food, I mean.”

“My sister Olga and I used to make borscht on holidays. It tasted like borscht.”

Hera pauses, flickers. “Thank you, Dr. Hilbert,” she says, and her voice is sincere.

“Minkowski!” Eiffel’s grinning again, like he has a secret. “What’s your cliché Boston poison? Sam Adams? Boston clam chowder? Boston cream pie? Lobster rolls?”

The commander snorts. “Would you believe I first had Sam Adams in Paris?”

“What?!?” Eiffel sounds like he’s been wounded. “But—it’s so _shitty_! In _Paris_? With all that—that Paris stuff”—he waves both hands excitedly, abstractedly—“just everywhere?” 

Minkowski smirks a little. “There was this guy I met there. He’d gotten a taste for it, and had a couple bottles.”

“A French boy? I’ve always heard they had _taste_.”

“Czech. And he’d picked it up in England—God knows why I never had it in California, or Massachusetts, or anywhere I got stationed, but had to acquire the taste in Europe.”

“Commander, _please_. Tell us the story!” Hera wheedles, sounding about six.

“It isn’t really—ok. So. I was on leave for several weeks one spring, so I went to visit my cousin Jules, who’s a dancer. My mother’s nephew. And he was living in an old house in the Latin Quarter with a bunch of other young men. I think Felipe was doing a bread apprenticeship. And Max worked at Shakespeare &co.—Jules and I pranked him at work one time, we turned up in wigs and giant sunglasses and pretended to be celebrities on a sightseeing jaunt. Anyway. The last guy in the house was named Dominik. A journalist. He’d just started working for _The Globe_. One night he and I were the only ones in the house, and he asked if I wanted to go for a walk. We ended up having a picnic in Pere Lachaise, which is this... It’s a cemetery. But also a park. We found Oscar Wilde’s grave, and Isadora Duncan’s, and that guy from The Doors, and we… Anyway. We bought kebabs from a hole-in-the-wall and walked back to a nice grassy spot, and Dominik pulled out a blanket, and these apple hand pies he made, and the beer. Which we then had to hide from a gendarme, and then we rode the metro giggling and… Well. Hera, beer tastes like sourdough bread, but liquid and alcoholic, and Sam Adams is _not_ great. But it’s not awful either. Dominik likes it because when he was at Oxford, he had an American roommate who got him drunk for the first time on it. I like it because he—I just do. Oh my _God_ stop _staring_ at me.”

“I’m not,” all three said, together.

“I was just listening!” Eiffel insists.

“I’m technically staring at _all_ of you—oh, that’s not better is it,” Hera babbles.

Hilbert frowns. “I did a fellowship at Oxford.”

Minkowski focuses on him, relieved. This is an easy conversation. Her blush subsides. “Oh, how interesting.” It’s not really. “Did you like it?”

A grunt. “It was adequate. Which college was your friend in, do you know?”

“St. Hilda’s,” she says, immediately.

Hilbert shakes his head. “You must be mistaken. St. Hilda’s is all women.” There is a very long pause. “Could it have been St. Hugh’s?”

“It’s co-ed now. St. Hilda’s.” Minkowski says, finally.

“But it wasn’t when I was there. Is he very much younger than you?”

“Drop it, Dr. No.” Eiffel gives Minkowski a reassuring nod, out of Hilbert’s line of sight, and changes the subject.  “That reminds me of this time my uncle made a cake for my birthday. My Uncle Avishai raised me, and he couldn’t cook for shit. He could use a microwave, sort of. Anyway, my birthday is Christmas Day, so we usually did the stereotypical Jewish Christmas—takeout and a movie, with this little group of friends of mine who also weren’t waiting for Santa Claus. But the year I turned 10 he realized the morning of that he’d forgotten dessert. I say morning. The man woke up at 3 am and felt so guilty he decided to bake a cake. Right then. The only store he finds open is a gas station. And, mind you, he’d never made me a cake in the past. Usually he got one from Dairy Queen, or maybe a grocery store sheet cake. So he’s all confident, and buys stuff that’s _like_ what he had on his recipe. No flour—so he buys Nilla Wafers and crushes them up. No sugar—so he got Pixy Stix. No baking soda—so he buys orange Fanta.”

“Oh _no_ ,” Minkowski gasps.

“Oh _yes_. So I tiptoe downstairs at 6 am, and I find Uncle Avi and our _brand-new_ upstairs neighbor Rhys in the kitchen staring at this pan of sticky goop with the windows open and the smoke alarm blaring. Avi’s trying not to cry, and Rhys is stroking his chin very seriously and patting his shoulder and saying”—Eiffel puts on a thick, fake Welsh accent—“‘It’s ok, we can fix this.’” Eiffel laughs. “Rhys did fix it. He brought a bunch of stuff from his kitchen and made me a lemon cake with cream cheese frosting. It tasted like a sunbeam on new snow. Actually, he made a double batch and took the other cake to an expat Christmas party he was going to that night. _We_ went to see a double feature of _Aladdin_ and _The Muppet Christmas Carol._ Uncle Avishai kept doing Rhys favors to ‘say thanks.’ He knitted him a scarf, I think. And I remember him telling Rhys more than once that he’d bought _way_ too much takeout, he should totally come downstairs and share our dinner. And Rhys kept doing us favors back, and once they could, they got married to make their endless cycle of flirting easier. And we still talk about Fanta Claus coming to weird up Christmas. Ok, Hilbert, your turn for a happy food story that coulda been awful.”

Hilbert glowers, then looks fondly into the distance. “Once, I ate fugu sashimi. Mr. Cutter and I shared a business dinner in Osaka, where he encouraged me to try it. Its organs contain a muscle paralytic similar to Sarin gas, but when prepared with skill, it can be remarkably worth the risk. It tastes like fugu.”

“Well,” Eiffel chirps, “how cheery.” He reaches out and clumsily pats the top of the laptop Hera’s smiley face is displaying on. “Hit us with another one, baby.”

Hera flashes rapidly, excited. “Oh! Um. If you could eat anything, right now, what would it be?”

“Stone lasagna,” Minkowski says, sighing contentedly. “It’s like stone soup—everyone brings something—but we throw it all into lasagna. Used to do it with buddies in the air force. Different every single time, but always _damn_ good. Especially if Javier was there. He’d make the sauce from scratch, when he was. And it’d always end up with like half a dozen kinds of vegetables, and maybe some meat, and someone would volunteer to grab noodles. Which sometimes ended up being, like. Spaghetti. Farfalle. Not always lasagna. I guess it was the people, not the ingredients. But we knew how to make it good, and filling, and fun.” She takes a long, ragged breath. “Damn.” Her face looks weary. “I dunno, Hera. Lasagna tastes like a bunch of good savory stuff. One time we even put egg in. That was more of a—what’s it called. A strata. But it worked. And Fatimah always got herbs. Always. And once, she brought _herb_. Some guy gave it to her in exchange for a lift. Oh my god, we could’ve gotten in so much trouble for that. We thought it was—exciting? A story to tell, at the very least. I miss being young and stupid.” She stares up at the ceiling, and then: “Eiffel! Your turn, or I’m gonna start crying, and I will _not_ do that in front of my crew.”

Eiffel thinks for a while. “I’d be making savory pancakes with a little kid I know. We’d make latkes, and her mom’s recipe for scallion pancakes, and _my_ mom’s recipe for buckwheat pancakes. She’d mix them up in those weird good stainless-steel bowls I got from a kitchen supply place, and I’d fry them so she doesn’t catch her arm on the edge of the pan. She’ll learn better, eventually, but she hasn’t gotten great at kitchen safety yet. Applesauce on the latkes—tastes like a stormcloud rolling in. Fluffy and a little sweet, but with a little onion bite. We like the scallion ones with mango-chili sauce, so they taste salty and hot and a bit sweet, like a fast dance in a dark room. And the buckwheat ones get cherry jam, sour and fruity, but kinda sophisticated. Like watching a sunrise on purpose. And we’ll throw flour on each other like in _Fried Green Tomatoes_. But platonic, and also not queerbaiting? I’m worried you’ve got the wrong picture in your head, now. Did I mention Anne’s just a kid? Yeah, ok. Good kid. She’ll be a great cook someday. Uncle Avi likes to say the two of them are proof cooking ability is like being a wizard or a muggle—you _can_ or you _can’t._ I miss my family like someone cut off my leg, and then I kept feeling a cramp in my sole, and then Dr. Strange here told me the only way to stop the pain is to stand on it. Shit. Can we go to bed yet? I’m so tired I’m getting poetic. And you won’t like me when I’m poetic. I’m the Hulk of haiku.”

Hilbert rolls his eyes. “Another five minutes, Officer Eiffel. We must give our bodies sufficient time to absorb the light.”

“More like four minutes and 25 seconds,” Hera says, trying to be encouraging. “What would you like to be eating right now, Dr. Hilbert?”

“I would be having a glass of chardonnay with a salmon steak and vitamin D supplements, and luxuriating in not having to make up for my employer’s catastrophic error in stocking our mission’s necessities by sitting half-naked with my shipmates in front of a hastily-constructed UV lamp and a smiley face with delusions of grandeur!” Hilbert breathes heavily, his bellow still echoing faintly down the corridor. Hera flickers tentatively. Eiffel pretends to look at a splinter caught in the heel of his thumb, and Minkowski feigns interest in the rivets of the wall. “Hera,” Hilbert says slowly, “chardonnay tastes like chardonnay. Salmon tastes like salmon. And vitamin D supplements taste like nothing, usually, but when that mini-launch finally reaches us tomorrow, then they will taste like _ambrosia_. Or possibly gel capsules. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Hera’s timer dings, and Hilbert drops the wires he’s been using to transfer power to the UV lamp he and Eiffel (“MacGyvered” “improvised”) constructed. The room goes dim. Minkowski hauls a t-shirt over her head, Eiffel collapses the lamp tidily, and Hilbert curtly swings himself out of the room.

Eiffel and Minkowski meet each other’s eyes across the room.

“Commander,” Eiffel says, “may I propose we never speak of this again?”

“Approved, Officer Eiffel.” Minkowski aims a tired smile at Hera’s camera. “Good night, both of you.”

“Good night, Commander Minkowski.”

“Night, Commander.”

Minkowski floats confidently through the hatch, then catches herself and sticks just her head back in. “Eiffel?”

“Minkowski?”

“Thanks. For—earlier. When Hilbert was on my case. I wasn’t thinking, and I didn’t want to have to talk about—God, not even _my_ private life, but _Dominik_ ’s”

 “It’s none of his business,” Eiffel says, firmly. “And you get to tell stories without getting the third degree.”

“Yeah. Yeah, thanks. I—I’m gonna try to do better, getting him off your case too.” She glides out of sight, but calls behind herself: “Eiffel! Do your report!”

Eiffel sighs heavily. “Aw, man. She really had me liking her for a second.” He hauls himself in the direction of his own bunk.

“Eiffel?” Hera says, thoughtful. “Should I not have brought it up?”

“What? Nah, why’d you think that?”

“Oh, it’s just—you’re all sad, now.”

“We just can’t stop thinking of who we’re not eating with, is all.” He pats the wall, as though it were Hera’s hand or shoulder. “Don’t let it get to you. When Goddard works out your artificial taste buds, I’ll throw a dinner party, and we’ll invite everyone.”

Hera snorts again, and Eiffel wishes he could remember whether she’d always done that. “Promise?” she challenges, suspicious he’s patronizing her.

He knows it, and makes sure he can see his serious face. “Cross my heart. Once I make a promise—I never forget it. So you start picking the menu!”

“Fine. Good night, Officer Eiffel,” and he can hear the smile in her voice.

“Good night, Hera.”

**Author's Note:**

> Food. Food is good.
> 
> A bunch of my headcanons slipped in here when I wasn't looking! 
> 
> I like to write Dominik Koudelka, Minkowski's husband, as trans. No real reason, except I can, and representation makes me happy :) Conversation inspired by a recent time I had to side-step a question from someone I wasn't expecting to be familiar with a friend's old school.
> 
> Timeline? Officially 1 Jan 2014, between The Space You're In and You Want, I Solve. I tried to make backstories vague or plausibly forgettable where I knew a reveal happened later. Otherwise, *hand waves* 
> 
> Did you look at monsterpub's art yet? http://monsterpub.tumblr.com/post/174156267790/soooo-the-wolf-359-reverse-big-bang-is-a-thing-and
> 
> Isn't it GREAT?? My favorite bits, aside from everything, are: Hera's smiley face, Minkowski's BACK, Minkowski's DIMPLE, and Eiffel's grin.
> 
> And you can find me on Tumblr as https://cartograffiti.tumblr.com/


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